War in the Modern World

Standing by to receive orders, sir…

According to the US Department of Defense website, Secretary Gates ‘will speak about the future of the Army to the cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.’ at 1:15 pm Eastern Time (6:15 pm London) today, Friday, 25 February. DoD will stream the speech live here. As the uniformed representative at KoW, I will do my best to offer some insider analysis in as timely a fashion as my day job allows.

In my office I’ve been trying to get a betting pool started for what the topic will be (with few takers, unsurprisingly). Does anyone from the readership want to puts odds on implementation of repealing Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell? Or is this the revelation of more cuts to the DoD budget? Another restructuring of the US Army? What am I missing?

At any rate, watch the actual speech, if you can, rather than the soundbite version on tonight’s news or in tomorrow’s papers. The Friday afternoon timing does make me wonder if they are deliberately trying to bury it in the news cycle…

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7 thoughts on “Standing by to receive orders, sir…”

Jason Fritzsays:

I sure hope it’s not another restructuring. I would guess it’s about budget cuts and the Army moving forward as we pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan and what happens next. Flexibility to respond across the spectrum of threats, prepare to finish our current conflicts, and reinvigorate the Army’s ability to conduct high-scale mechanized warfare again. Especially with the Class of 2014 likely not being as involved in our current wars, I imagine he’ll be talking about further down the road.

I agree that it’s actually not likely to be about restructuring. Any announcement like that would probably come from the Chief of Staff or the Secretary of the Army rather than the SECDEF. I still do wonder, however, about something on DADT…

Not being in uniform anymore, I don’t know what the issues still are on DADT other than getting and implementing the guidance. While that may be part of it, since it’s billed as a future of the Army talk, and DADT affects the entirety of the military departments, that it won’t be the focus. But hey, I’m just spit-balling here.

On a lighter note, I’m guessing with the time of this talk that the cadets won’t have to do a review before or afterwards?

The challenges of ending the large deployment of troops in Iraq and Afgan. The transition of an Army at War yet in a world that has serious challenges to our National Security. The reality of decreasing Defense budgets, the need for cost management, reducing inefficiencies and waste.

The above are appropriate topics for the SECDEF. Restructuring the Army is something the Chief of Staff or the Army would announce and it is inevitable to reduce overhead and realign the force structure given the failed experiment of BCT’s.